Against the Loveless World

by Susan Abulhawa

  Mama and Sitti Wasfiyeh were happy too. In fact, the whole world was. Yasser Arafat got a Nobel Prize, an actual airport was being built in Gaza, and real Palestinian passports were being issued.

  “I never thought I’d see the day,” Sitti Wasfiyeh said, tearing up. But she still refused to apply for a visitor’s visa from the new Israeli embassy in Amman. “I’ve waited this long, I’ll wait a little more until I can go as a citizen in our own state. I’m not going to ask those sons of bitches for permission to go home. I have underwear older than the Zionist entity. The newsman said this Oslo thing means there will be a state in five years. Enshallah, I will still be alive in five years. Alhamdulillah.”

  Mama didn’t mind getting a visitor’s visa. “Let them think they own the land. I know better. I know the land owns us, her native children.”

  I kept quiet, hoping they wouldn’t notice me.

  Mama turned to me and said, “Praise God, my grandchildren will be born in Palestine.”

  “Wow. You skipped right to grandchildren. And here I was worried you were going to lecture me again about getting a divorce and remarrying,” I said.

  “Why are you always sarcastic?” Mama snapped. “Everything is a problem for you. What’s wrong with getting married again? Being normal? You’re like two different people. One minute you’re nice, the next you’re vicious.”

  “I didn’t realize you thought I was abnormal or vicious.”

  Mama narrowed her eyes, a habit that preceded an outburst. Growing up, I had watched it when she fought with my father, or on the days when I brought my report cards home, or when she argued with merchants she thought were ripping her off.

  “Yes, I do!” she began, one hand on her hip, the other pointing a finger in my face. “Because it’s not normal to choose to be alone this way. The way you talk about men as if they’re all devils is not normal. You are still young and beautiful. If you don’t find a man soon, you’re going to be alone for the rest of your life.”

  “Be quiet, both of you!” Sitti Wasfiyeh yelled. “You’re giving me a headache. My show is about to come on. Go fight outside.”

  “If you think men are essential to life, then why don’t you go find yourself a husband and leave me alone,” I yelled back, immediately regretting it.

  “Shut up, Nahr!” Jehad scolded me as Mama walked off, mumbling curses.

  I stayed in Amman to care for Sitti Wasfiyeh while Mama and Jehad went to Palestine. Part of me wanted to go, to get the divorce and have a fresh start. I wanted, too, to visit Palestine as an adult; to see my husband’s mother, Hajjeh Um Mhammad, and finally meet his famous brother, Bilal, about whom we had all heard so much over the years. But I told myself I wasn’t ready. I realize now, in the silence that echoes off itself in the Cube, that I didn’t want to face rumors about me that had likely already traveled there. In the long, idle hours since we came to Amman, I had begun to idealize Palestine as others did, and I secretly imagined a fresh start, maybe opening my own salon there as Mama suggested I do in Amman.

  “My daughters are happy to take care of me!” Sitti Wasfiyeh said, adding, “But you should stay here to keep the house clean.”

  I knew it wouldn’t be long before Sitti Wasfiyeh made up an excuse to come back. As much as she tried to be part of her daughters’ families, she was rarely more than a burden to them. It took just one day for her to call me to come get her, claiming she had forgotten her blood pressure medicine.

  “I can bring your pills to you, Sitti,” I said.

  “Just do as I say and come get me,” she huffed, and hung up.

  I chatted a bit with my insufferable aunt Latifa when I arrived. She told me Sitti Wasfiyeh had complained that she had to go back to the apartment “to keep watch over you since you are there alone.” I didn’t contradict her, because I wasn’t about to bad-talk my grandmother to her. I only trash-talked Sitti Wasfiyeh to my mother and Jehad. I noticed, too, that my aunt began rushing me out the door after her husband called to tell her he was returning home early.

  Before we left, I said to Sitti Wasfiyeh, in front of Aunt Latifa, “I’m lucky to have a grandmother like you who doesn’t leave me alone in the apartment.” Sitti smiled with her loose dentures and dancing eyes. All my life I had heard Sitti Wasfiyeh claim how much her daughters wanted her to live with them, how we were lucky she chose us instead, and how poorly we compared financially, in beauty, in housekeeping and cooking skills, which was directly tied to our inability to please our husbands. She’d always blamed geography, but now we were in the same city, and they still weren’t doing much for her. It broke her heart, though she wouldn’t admit it, not even to herself. Mama would lie that my aunts had called to check on Sitti Wasfiyeh. An argument would inevitably ensue, with Sitti Wasfiyeh accusing Mama of intentionally not answering their calls until she was away, taking a bath or a nap, to keep her from her daughters. But we didn’t mind her insults and accusations, because we preferred my grandmother ornery rather than heartbroken.

  Mama and Jehad were in Palestine for two weeks. It was the first and only time Sitti Wasfiyeh and I had been alone together for more than a few hours, and although I dreaded it initially, they turned out to be lovely, memorable days. Sitti Wasfiyeh was different without my mother and Jehad around. Or maybe I was. She had always loved smoking argileh in outdoor coffeehouses. We used to take her to beachfront cafés in Kuwait, and like a child in a toy store, she’d have to be coaxed and prodded to leave. Since we’d moved to Amman, she had taken to smoking on our balcony overlooking a trash-strewn street, but it was “better than nothing,” she said.

  One evening, while we sat together on the balcony of our small apartment watching children in the street, their clothes stained with the day’s play, my grandmother told me about the time her father caught her smoking. “I was about thirteen or fourteen, shortly before I got married. My grandfather, who would be your great-great-grandfather, used to leave his argileh still lit for us to clean. I would smoke a little if no one was around, before washing it. One day when he went to mosque, my cousins and I took turns finishing it off. We smoked until the charcoal was all ash, but just as we got up to empty it, my father walked in.” Sitti took another puff on the argileh pipe. “He didn’t see us actually smoking, but the room was full of smoke, and he knew. We lied, but that only made him angrier. We all got a beating.”

  “What about Sidi?” I asked. “Did he mind you smoking?”

  “Your grandfather loved it, because he thought I was naughty. Good girls didn’t smoke back then. The two of us smoked together, only in private, of course. We had a great time,” she said, her eyes moistened by the long-ago time and place that still lived within her. “I never thought there would come a day when women could just sit in outdoor cafés and smoke like the men,” she added, turning to me, grinning. “That’s the best part for me. But I’m old and it’s okay. For women of your generation, it just makes them loose and do bad things.”

  “Oh, Sitti, don’t start with that,” I said.

  “I’m not talking about you. I know you’re a good girl. You don’t even smoke at home,” she said.

  I left it at that, watching her profile, the wrinkles on her cheek moving and changing with every puff on the argileh, and I tried to imagine her on the cusp of marriage, still a little girl sneaking a smoke with her cousins in Palestine.

  “You know, I always had a bad feeling about that no-good dog you married,” she said. My grandmother had a knack for revisionist history. Back then she’d said he was too good for me and urged me to accept his proposal to make an honest woman of me. She had told my mother she’d better marry me off before I let someone puncture my hymen and destroy my reputation. She’d said I was already too old and the marriage window would soon be closing. But not now. “I’m glad you got rid of him,” she said.

  Our extended family in Palestine had heard about Jehad’s imprisonment in Kuwait and received him as a hero, welcoming him with feasts in his honor in the homes of cousin
s we had only heard about or met once or twice as children. Mama was grateful, but it seemed neither she nor Jehad felt at home.

  “Everything is different,” Mama told me upon their return to Amman. “All the checkpoints, Jewish settlement construction, foreign Jews everywhere. I hardly recognized the place. I felt like a stranger in my own country.”

  Mama had refused to talk on the phone about her trip to her childhood home in Haifa, but now I pressed her.

  “What can I say, my daughter,” she said, an unfamiliar new grief suffusing her expression. “Foreign Jews were living there like they were the real owners.” She waved her hand as she often did to shoo away pain.

  “What was it like? Did you go inside? This is important, Mama. Why are you waving it off?” I prodded.

  Mama threw an orange she had been peeling onto the floor. “Why don’t you know when to stop?” Her chin quivered.

  We were quiet for a while, until Jehad started on politics, our panacea conversation to mask whatever needed masking. Oslo was the topic of the day. From all the hoopla on the news about peace and that Oslo deal, I had thought life would be different there.

  Jehad said, “It’s true people feel hopeful. But Oslo is just for show. Something terrible is happening behind it.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, but he waved me off too and changed the subject.

  The big news was mostly about Bilal, the brother-in-law I had never met, who’d been imprisoned in exchange for my husband’s freedom and only recently freed in the prisoner release part of the Oslo Accords.

  “He’s taken to tending sheep in the hills. Strange. A very quiet man,” Mama said, happy to move on to gossip, just as the rhythmic thud of Sitti Wasfiyeh’s cane arose in the hallway in tempo with her unsteady steps.

  “From a fighter with a Kalashnikov to a sheepherder with a stick,” Sitti Wasfiyeh said ruefully. “They’re breaking our fighters. If ever there was a symbol of what those Zionist dogs, sons of sixty dogs, are doing to us …” Sitti Wasfiyeh shook her head and let the words hang over us.

  “Sitti, how do you know what we’re talking about?” I asked.

  “I was listening by the door!” she said, matter-of-fact. “I wanted to see if you were talking about me.”

  Jehad got up to help her onto the floor mat. “God bless you, son,” she thanked him, and reached for the bowl of cherries and pomegranate arils we were snacking on.

  “I don’t think it’s like that, Sitti.” Jehad went back to talking about Bilal. “He’s decent and smart. Nothing like his brother. Plus, he hasn’t abandoned the resistance.”

  This piqued my interest, not because of Bilal or the resistance, but because of the way Jehad said it. I knew my brother well enough to know when a larger story was hidden in the folds of a few uttered words, but it was futile to probe him in front of Mama and Sitti Wasfiyeh.

  “Your grandmother is right, Jehad. The smart chemist and great fighter Israel was hunting all those years wasn’t at all what I expected. Bilal was small and meek. Didn’t have much to say. I was not impressed.” Mama sucked in air through her teeth.

  Jehad fidgeted with the pomegranate arils in his hand, then looked up at Mama. “Small, meek, and quiet describes me pretty well,” he said. Mama protested, but he stopped her. “And as unimpressive as I may seem to you, going from a medical student to a simple gardener, I assure you that you have no clue what is inside of me.”

  Jehad got up and left the house, ignoring Mama’s pleas, and I knew that whatever was stirring inside him, it had to do with Palestine. I suspected he knew more about Bilal and resistance activities there than he was letting on.

  “Let him go,” Sitti Wasfiyeh told her, and mumbled prayers for his safety, peace of mind, and blessed future with a wife and family of his own. Amen.

  “Mama, you have to lay off Jehad. He’s not interested in going back to school. He’s content in his job and earns a decent living. You have to stop nagging him about studying, working, and marriage and kids and whatever. All he hears is your disappointment,” I said.

  “How do you know what he hears? Did he tell you?”

  “No, Mama. He didn’t tell me. I know because that’s all I hear when you nag me every day about my life and what a failure you think I am.”

  “I never said that!” she protested, then began to cry when I walked away into the kitchen. She followed me there. “Why does everybody walk away from me when I say something is wrong with this family? What’s wrong with wanting more for my children?”

  Mama took me by the arm. “Never mind your brother right now. There’s something I need to ask you.” She paused. “People heard things about you.”

  I raised one eyebrow to her.

  “They didn’t mention Um Buraq by name, but they said there was talk you spent a lot of time with an older Kuwaiti woman with a bad reputation,” she said.

  “Who said that?”

  “Your aunts,” she said.

  “Of course it would come from those bitches,” I said. “While you were away, Latifa hurried me out of her house before her husband came home, like she was afraid he’d see me there.”

  Mama made a face like she was holding back a question.

  “What?” I demanded.

  “Well, I mean, I’ve always found that friendship odd,” she said.

  “Um Buraq has been good to all of us!” I feigned outrage. “You know better than anyone how people love to talk about any and every woman who ends up without her husband.”

  Mama recoiled, probably remembering the humiliating days after Baba died in another woman’s arms.

  “Mama, Um Buraq is a good person. She doesn’t deserve what people say about her. And she has been a good friend to me.”

  “I know, habibti. I’m sorry,” she said.

  Without consulting me, Jehad had made arrangements for my divorce while he was in Palestine. “I spoke with Bilal about it. His brother agreed to give him power of attorney to execute the divorce on his behalf,” Jehad told me. “But you have to do it, Nahr. Mama is right about this. You can’t stay tied to that man.”

  Jehad could barely say Mhammad’s name. It wasn’t only that he had abandoned me and disappeared without a word, but there had been rumors that Mhammad had become (and might have been all along) an Israeli informer. Few believed it because of his history, and of course because of the respect his brother, Bilal, commanded. But there had been enough sightings of him in Tel Aviv to refute the story that he was living in exile somewhere in the West.

  “Really? How do you know? You’re hiding something from me. I can feel it,” I said.

  “Nanu, I’m not. That’s all I know,” he said.

  “Are you working with Bilal somehow?” I moved closer, looking deeply into him for some hint.

  He looked down at me with softer eyes. “Nanu, I just met the guy. I’m trying to look out for you. You have to cut this last string with Mhammad, or else you’ll never be free.”

  Free. As if any of us could ever be so.

  “Fine. I’ll go. I’ll get the damn divorce. I have to save up some money first,” I said.

  Before I left for Palestine, Jehad invited us all to his new place for ghada. He had moved out not long after returning from Palestine to a rent-free place in exchange for maintaining the landlord’s property. He was still cooking when we arrived but would not allow us to help. “I’m not letting you take credit for this feast.” He winked his good eye and shooed me out of his kitchen. “Nanu, you can set up the space.”

  He had a rather elaborate computer setup, like something one would see at a major business enterprise. Until then, I had only seen computers at the Internet cafés popping up around the country. I had heard that rich people had private computers.

  “What is all this, Jehad?”

  He peeked out from behind the kitchen wall. “It’s nothing. I’m fixing up a used system to have my own server.”

  “What’s a server?”

  “Forget it. Can you set up for th
e food? I’m almost done.”

  Mama and I unfolded a plastic cloth on the floor and arranged floor cushions around it. After half an hour of clanging kitchen-ware, Jehad emerged with a tray of maqlooba—layered eggplant, rice, and chicken in special spices—bowls of cucumber and yogurt sauce, and various salads and pickles. “How is it I never knew you could cook?” I said, surprised how delicious it was.

  “I figured I needed to learn before we get ulcers from all the hot spices you put in our food,” he teased, his warm smile reminding me how close we used to be.

  “Don’t you bad-talk your sister,” Sitti Wasfiyeh said.

  “Ordinarily you would take a crack at my terrible cooking,” I joked.

  “Just eat, my granddaughter,” she said, putting more chicken on my plate, her ill-fitting dentures threatening to fall out as she chewed. Sitti Wasfiyeh had grown kinder since our time alone. Jehad smiled at me.

  My brother’s new home was a small studio apartment on the ground floor of a five-story building in a wealthy Amman neighborhood. Unlike Kuwait, where neighborhoods were segregated by class and nationality, the rich and poor lived cheek-by-jowl in Jordan. Not for some egalitarian ideals, but for the convenience of the rich.

  “So this way they have you at their beck and call?” I said, worried that these wealthy Jordanians were taking advantage of my brother.

  “They’re fine people, Nahr.”

  “Well, in my experience, the rich buy the poor and then throw them out when they’re done.”

  “They’re not all like Kuwaitis, not that Kuwaitis are all the same either. You loved Um Buraq, didn’t you?” Jehad said.

  “Enough of that. Let’s enjoy this meal together without mentioning Kuwait,” Mama said. “I am excited that you’re going to Palestine, Nahr.” She stroked my cheek. “But also eager for you to come back quickly.”

  Palestine had begun to feel more real since Mama and Jehad had made their trip. Maybe it was the experience of war and exile, or just the passage of time; maybe it was my contemplation of Mama’s tatreez, or simply not wanting to be in Amman that made Palestine bloom in my imagination. It was no longer the lost home and heritage trapped in Mama’s tin box of old photos from her childhood in Haifa, my parents’ wedding, and their life in Ein el-Sultan. As I began planning my trip, I sifted through those pictures with Mama. In one, a ten-year-old version of my mother posed under a fig tree.